Blood Money

by James Grippando

  “Theo,” she said, smiling thinly. “So I actually get to meet your friend Theo?”

  “Yes. Theo’s driving.”

  “Loved his interview with Faith Corso. That crack about the rot-in-hell snuggies was hilarious.”

  “Yeah, he’s a real stitch.”

  “He seems totally my type.”

  “Theo is nobody’s type.”

  “That’s exactly my type.”

  Jack drew a breath, then let it out. “Sydney, let me give you some fatherly advice.”

  “You’re not old enough to be my father.”

  “Yeee . . . almost. Let’s call it friendly advice. You need to keep a low profile when you get out.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “I don’t mean just for a week, or even a month. It’s going to take a long time for this craziness to subside. The first photograph of you in a club having a good time is going to be worth a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “So that’s no B.S. from Faith Corso? Someone is actually willing to pay me a hundred thousand dollars for my picture?”

  “No, they won’t pay you a thing. They’ll pay the photographer who snaps the picture.”

  She pursed her lips, then an idea came. “I know. Your buddy Theo’s a bartender, right? We go to his bar, you snap the picture, and we split the hundred grand.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “First of all, I’m not interested. Second, as things stand right now, I would say that I’m concerned about your safety, but we can manage it. The moment this trial puts ten cents in your pocket, it’s a different story.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Let me be clear. No magazine can pay you enough for a photo, no publisher can pay you enough for a book, no movie studio can pay you enough for the film rights to cover the costs of the security you will need if Faith Corso tells her viewers that you’ve turned the murder of your daughter into personal profit.”

  Sydney gripped the table’s edge. “I didn’t kill my daughter.”

  “We didn’t prove that.”

  “I’m not supposed to have to prove it.”

  “That’s true. That’s why you’re about to be a free woman.”

  “Free enough to work for free? Is that it?”

  “I didn’t say you can’t work for a living.”

  “Who’s going to hire me? Other than a porn king?”

  Those calls had already come to Jack’s office. “Don’t go that route.”

  “I may have no choice. In two days I have to pay rent, eat, just like everyone else.”

  “This will pass with time.”

  “When?”

  “That’s up to you. It could be never, if you become the poster child for taking blood money.”

  The words made her cringe. “I don’t get that term, ‘blood money.’ On The Sopranos that was what a hit man got for a contract killing.”

  “It’s one of those terms that has gotten away from its original meaning. Technically, blood money is what a murderer pays to compensate the victim’s family.”

  “Perfect. TV murdered my daughter. Over and over, day after day. They can pay me for the rights to the made-for-TV movie. All nice and legal. Blood money. You can cut the deal.”

  “I’m not cutting any deals.”

  He said it with finality, no room for negotiation—which elicited a cold glare from Sydney. She suddenly didn’t look like a teenager in pajamas anymore. Reporters who had watched their interaction in the courtroom and described similar expressions as “pouty” had no idea what the real Sydney was like.

  “Then I’ll find someone who will,” she fired back.

  Jack let her simmer, but she wasn’t cooling down.

  Sydney rose. “Are we done, Jack?”

  “We haven’t really covered the whole plan for Saturday night.”

  She walked to the green metal door and knocked for the guard. “I don’t care about the fucking plan,” she said, not even trying to get her temper under control. “Just do your job and get me out of here.”

  The door opened. Sydney stepped out, and one of the corrections officers led her back to the housing unit. Jack gathered his briefcase and exchanged glances with the other officer at the door. The guards had seen many meetings between Jack and his client end this way—Sydney gnawing at her lip, fists clenched, red-faced with anger.

  “What’s she so mad about now?” the guard asked.

  “I handed her my bill,” said Jack.

  The guard laughed. It was public knowledge that Sydney was indigent. “Good luck with that, partner.”

  “It takes luck,” said Jack, continuing to the visitors’ exit.

  Chapter Four

  South Beach called to him. Theo was speeding east on the Dolphin Expressway, well aware that if he kept going for another twenty minutes, past I-95 and across the causeway, he would run smack into Ocean Drive, where hundreds of bad girls were ready to party. Ironically, a quick exit at Twelfth Avenue put him on a collision course with hundreds of others who were more than ready, but who weren’t going anywhere tonight.

  Except for one Sydney Bennett.

  Theo parked the SUV in a dark lot beside a tall chain-link fence, followed the cracked sidewalk beneath the interstate overpass, and walked across the street to the Miami-Dade County Women’s Detention Center.

  The multistory center north of downtown Miami housed 375 female inmates. Some were awaiting trial. Others were serving time. Theo remembered the days of contact visits from his childhood, when his mother—in and out of jail on drug-possession charges—could hug him. Contact was no longer allowed, which was one of the many tidbits of information that Theo had picked up while listening to Faith Corso and her panel of experts on BNN fill hour after hour in the final chapter of Shot Mom coverage. The thought of Sydney Bennett’s return to the comfort and pleasure of human contact after killing her daughter had so many loyal viewers upset. Many were downright furious. Some—“an army of thousands,” according to Corso—were fed up with the system and ready to take justice into their own hands. The exact temperature of the crowd was hard to determine, but it was undeniable that few, if any, corrections facilities had scheduled a more anticipated release than Sydney’s.

  Most of the detention center’s windows had been dark since nightfall, but lights were still shining in the ground-floor lobby, the release point for inmates in the system. A pair of corrections officers stood guard, and all appeared quiet on the other side of the glass doors. It was completely unlike the spectacle on Seventh Avenue and the park directly across the street.

  “Ho-lee shit,” Theo muttered.

  The night air was thick with humidity, the mercury still in the high eighties, and all those bare arms and legs were a veritable feast for hungry mosquitoes. People were milling about, walking with no particular destination in mind, just wanting to be there for “the moment.” It was as if the beaches had closed, happy hour was over, and an armada of sunburned tourists had wandered over to the jail for free entertainment. Parents with their young children. High-school kids on their bicycles. College students with rum-filled go-cups in hand. Vendors selling boiled peanuts and bottled water. Drivers on the elevated stretch of expressway above it all honked their horns as they passed the detention center, as if it were New Year’s Eve or the Super Bowl. One young man stood outside the center with a homemade sign that was sure to get him on television: MARRY ME, SYDNEY.

  “Snuggies,” a vendor called out, “get your hand-stitched snuggies.”

  Theo did a double take. ROT IN HELL, SYDNEY was the stitched message. Theo had been joking on the Faith Corso Show, but this entrepreneur had stolen his idea and run with it.

  The bright lights of a camera crew caught his attention. A BNN reporter had staked out a position on the sidewalk just a few feet behind him. She was interviewing the young man with the handheld marriage proposal, earnestly trying to find out what would make him want to spend the rest of his life with S
ydney Bennett.

  “Well, uhm, she’s really hot,” he said, reaching up inside the John Deere cap to scratch his head. “Obviously she, uh, likes to party. And did I say she’s hot?”

  Theo’s phone vibrated. He stepped away from the small gathering around the television crew and checked the text message. It was from Jack.

  “Hang,” it read.

  They had worked out a system back at the hotel. The release could happen any time between midnight and two A.M. Such a broad window of time made it impractical for Theo to sit in the SUV with the motor running. The agreement was that Jack would update Theo by text every fifteen minutes. “Hang” meant nothing was happening. When it was time to bring the SUV around, the message would read “Greenlight.”

  Theo slid his phone into his pocket. He had at least another fifteen minutes to kill, probably more. He continued down the sidewalk, beyond the detention center’s main entrance, toward the more secure wing that butted up against the elevated expressway. Razor ribbon topped a high chain-link fence that extended beneath the overpass, and the streetlamps cast the yellowish glow of high-security vapor lights. Theo was sweating, but he suddenly felt goose bumps. The dark prison walls, the guard towers and ribbon wire, the vigil keepers outside the chain-link fence—it was eerily reminiscent of the darkest time of his life, those hours before the execution he had narrowly avoided at Florida State Prison. This time, however, there was no competing right and left ideology, no clash of capital punishment proponents versus death penalty opponents, no “eye for an eye” versus “Kumbaya.” This crowd was unified in its vitriol, especially at this end of the parking lot. This was where the hard-core Shot Mom haters had set up camp.

  “No blood money!”

  A middle-aged woman, hoarse from hours of shouting, was screaming at Theo. Theo kept walking, but she stayed with him, shaking a poster that delivered the same message in bloodred letters:

  NO BLOOD MONEY FOR SHOT MOM!

  “And for her lawyer, neither!” another woman shouted.

  Theo stopped and fired back a response that these women undoubtedly thought was still part of the black-speak lexicon. “Right on, sistuh.”

  The women continued their chant, and a group behind them picked it up: “No blood money, no blood money, no blood money!”

  The mantra had started a week earlier on the Faith Corso Show, when a guest commentator had reported incorrectly that Jack was in New York City shopping a million-dollar book deal for Sydney. Corso had seized the moment to rally her troops: “We cannot let this happen,” she’d told her viewers. “The injustice of Shot Mom’s acquittal will forever stain the hands of those twelve jurors who ignored the clear evidence of guilt. But if we stand aside and let Shot Mom sign her million-dollar deal with publishers in New York or filmmakers in Hollywood . . . well, then shame on all of us. There truly will be no justice for Emma. So stand up, friends. Stand up with me and say it:

  “No blood money!”

  The glare of the television lights caught Theo’s eye, and again he found himself just a few yards away from the BNN reporter with her camera crew. The live interview of the moment was with an elderly woman from Lake City who had followed Faith Corso’s coverage of the case from the beginning. She was describing the poster that she and her eleven-year-old granddaughter had created to protest Sydney Bennett’s release. It was a collage of headlines and photographs spanning three years of newspaper coverage. Her voice quaked with emotion as she told the reporter about the photograph in the middle of the poster, a five-by-seven headshot of Sydney’s daughter, Emma.

  “We glued on all these pictures this morning with plain old white glue,” the woman said, “and we used the exact same glue on Emma’s picture. But Emma’s is the only one where the glue soaked through the paper and left these red marks. Not a single one of these other pictures have that. You see what I’m talking about?” she asked, pointing.

  “Yes, I do see,” said the reporter. “Let’s get the camera in closer for our viewers.”

  “It looks like tiny red tears on her little cheeks, don’t it?”

  “Remarkable,” the reporter said. “Viewers can draw their own conclusions, but, seeing it with my own eyes, I can only say that this is truly remarkable.”

  “I believe that’s the Lord’s way of telling us that we’re doing the right thing here tonight, and I believe—”

  A shout from across the parking lot halted the interview: “There she is!”

  Theo’s gaze locked onto the commotion in the middle distance, and the BNN reporter signaled her cameraman to zoom onto the building.

  “Hold on, Faith,” said the reporter. “We may have a Shot Mom sighting.”

  Heads turned as random voices carried the news of one sighting after another.

  “It’s her!”

  “There’s Shot Mom!”

  Onlookers jumped up from their lawn chairs and picnic blankets. Demonstrators grabbed their posters and sprinted across the street toward the high-security end of the building. A crowd that, minutes earlier, had been milling around and waiting was suddenly a cohesive ball of energy, catapulted by the Sydney sighting.

  Theo ran, too, not sure what had happened to Jack’s plan, wondering if he had missed the “Greenlight” message. He checked his iPhone, but the display showed NO SERVICE. The Sydney sighting had overloaded the system, but word of mouth was spreading all around him.

  “I see her!”

  “Yeah, that’s her!”

  Theo tried to get closer, but it was human gridlock ahead of him. Demonstrators blocked the sidewalk and the exit to the parking lot, but he was tall enough to see over most of the people in front of him. The most vocal and aggressive in the crowd, the tip of the human spear, had surrounded a young woman whose white blouse made her an easy mark in the darkness. People shook their fists and brandished their posters, shouting at her. She shouted back, but that only seemed to unify the mob.

  “No blood money, no blood money!”

  She darted in one direction, then in the other, desperately seeking a way out. The human circle around her drew tighter, and the angry crowd moved closer.

  “No blood money!”

  The BNN reporter and crew tried to push forward, but there was nowhere for them to go. Theo was trapped beside them and could hear the on-the-scene reporter shouting into her microphone with an update for the studio.

  “Faith, you are absolutely correct. It does appear that this is the moment, the dreaded moment of Sydney Bennett’s release from prison.”

  A big guy from BNN’s lighting crew gave one more shove. Suddenly, the logjam broke, there was a collective surge forward, and Theo nearly fell over the woman in front of him. He helped her up, and then peered across the sea of heads that stretched all the way to the chain-link fence. The buffer zone—a few feet of separation—between the mob and its prey had disappeared. The woman in the white blouse had been swallowed up in the crowd, her body somewhere beneath the hysteria.

  “No blood money!”

  Theo checked his cell again, but he was still without service. He wasn’t sure what to do, but things were turning ugly. He gripped the phone, useless as it was, frustrated enough to shout at the top of his lungs, but he kept it inside.

  What the hell is going on, Jack?

  Chapter Five

  Jack stared at the television in disbelief. He was seated at a table in the detention center lounge with a corrections officer whose walkie-talkie was crackling with updates from the dispatcher: “Backup needed, zone five. Backup, zone five.”

  The Faith Corso Show was coming in loud and clear on an old fifteen-inch television that rested on the counter next to the coffeemaker. BNN’s coverage had switched to an aerial shot from the helicopter, the studio having temporarily lost contact with the camera crew in the field. Jack increased the volume as Corso described the carnage to her national audience from her studio desk.

  “Once again, friends, you are watching BNN’s exclusive coverage of the live action
outside the Miami-Dade County Women’s Detention Center. We are trying to reestablish contact with our reporter on the scene, Heather Brown, but this much we know. At approximately twelve nineteen A.M., Shot Mom was spotted on the north side of the building. As incomprehensible as this sounds, her defense team apparently thought she could slip through the crowd unnoticed. Things have gone terribly wrong, riot police are trying to establish order, and we can only hope that no innocent people have been caught up in this maelstrom.”

  A camera from a media helicopter tracked an ambulance as it sped down Seventh Avenue, orange and yellow lights flashing as it pulled into the parking lot.

  “Emergency vehicles are now on the scene,” said Corso, “and I’m told we have reconnected with Heather Brown. Heather, what is the situation on the ground now?”

  “Utter and complete chaos,” said Brown. There was audio contact, but no video.

  “Do we have official confirmation that Shot Mom was, in fact, in the parking lot?”

  Brown said something to her cameraman, and the on-screen image switched from the helicopter view to ground level. Brown was standing on the sidewalk, just outside the perimeter of panic and confusion.

  “Faith, there is no official word yet from the Department of Corrections, but we have accounts from eyewitnesses who have stated in no uncertain terms that Sydney Bennett is somewhere in the middle of all this. We are trying to bring one of those eyewitnesses over here now to talk with us on camera.” Brown adjusted her earpiece, listening to her producer, then spoke with greater urgency. “Faith, I am told we do have someone with us now,” she said.

  “Mic her up so I can talk to her,” said Corso.

  “She’s right here. I can ask her directly.”

  “Heather, this will work so much better for everyone if you just hand over your earpiece and microphone and let me speak to her.”

  The “my show” attitude was what Corso’s fans loved about her. Even Jack was starting to find her schtick engrossing in its own way. As the reporter on the scene complied, Corso set the dramatic stage for her own breaking-news moment.